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Over the meadows, beyond the mountains,there once lived a painter called Klee,and he sat on his own on a pathwith various bright-coloured crayons.

He drew rectangles and he drew hooks,an imp in a light-blue shirt,Africa, stars, a child on a platform,wild beasts where Sky meets Earth.

He never intended his sketchesto be like passport photos,with people, horses, cities and lakesstanding up straight like robots.

He wanted these lines and these spotsto converse with one anotheras clearly as cicadas in summer,but then one morning a feather

materialized as he sketched.A wing, the crown of ahead -the Angel of Death. It was timefor Klee to part from his friends

and his Muse. He did.He died.Can anything be more cruel?Though had Paul Klee been any less wise,his angel might have touched us all

and we too, along with the artist,might have left the world behindwhile that angel shook up our bones,but – what help would that have been?

Me, I'd much rather walk through a gallerythan lie in some sad cemetery.I like to loiter with friends by paintings -yellow-blue wildlings, follies most serious.

by Арсений Александрович Тарковский(Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky)(1957)translated by Robert Chandler

Arseny was the father of the famous and highly influential film director Andrei Tarkovsky. His poetry was often quoted in his son’s films.

Paul Klee (18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci’s A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Here is a reading of the poem in Russian set to music featuring one of Klee’s artworks.

O sacrifice to reckless thought,it seems you must have hopedyour scanty blood had power enoughto melt the eternal Pole.A puff of smoke, a silent flickerupon the age-old ice -and then a breath of iron winterextinguished every trace.

Fun fact: Counted amongst the admirers of Tyutchev’s works were Dostoevsky and Tolstoy along with Nekrasov and Fet. Then later Osip Mandelstam who, in a passage approved of by Shalamov, believed that a Russian poet should not have copy of Tyutchev in his personal library – he should know all of Tyutchev off by heart.

This is an excerpt from a song about the night’s last trolleybus, which is blue and rescues the lost and lonely granting them a sense of wordless communion. Some consider Okudzhava’s gentle and welcoming songs to be this symbolic bluetrolleybus as his songs brought an intimacy into a world that had been ruled by intimidation.

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (Russian: Булат Шалвович Окуджава; Georgian: ბულატ ოკუჯავა) (May 9, 1924 – June 12, 1997) was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter of Georgian-Armenian ancestry. He was one of the founders of the Soviet genre called “author song” (авторская песня), or “guitar song”, and the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folksong traditions and the French chansonnier style represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as Georges Brassens. Though his songs were never overtly political (in contrast to those of some of his fellow Soviet bards), the freshness and independence of Okudzhava‘s artistic voice presented a subtle challenge to Soviet cultural authorities, who were thus hesitant for many years to give official recognition to Okudzhava.

Dense, inpenetrable, Tatar,drawn from God knows when,it clings to every disaster,itself a doom without end.

by Анна Ахматова (Anna Akhmatova) a.k.a.Anna Gorenko(1960s)translation by Robert Chandler

Extra information: Akhmatova wrote the above piece about her pen name during her later years. When Anna Andreyevna Gorenko began publishing poetry, in her late teens, her father considered it an unrespectable pursuit and so she adopted her grandmother’s Tatar surname of Akhmatova as a pen name when publishing her works from then on as Anna Akhmatova by which name she is more commonly known.